Photos

Photos

There it sits in our TV room. An old wooden tool chest that masquerades as a coffee table and often used footstool. We bought it at a garage sale years ago thinking it would make an attractive storage bin of some kind. The wood is marred and stained but it has a unique character about it. All but forgotten it, it hides a treasure hold of memories.

While rearranging the room, we opened the old chest to discover hundreds and hundreds of glossy 3x5, 6x4, enlarged school photos, 35m colored slides, and other assorted mementos of ages past. There it was, a menagerie of family history piled in disarray in that old wood chest.

I confess that I have neither time or patience to even begin to sort through all those photos. Judy took on the challenge. She purchased plastic containers and began the process of sorting through photos of each of our children and other significant family events. While watching the QVC and reruns of old Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel, she started making sense of our pictorial family history.

I confess that several times I started digging through the pile only to get lost in the memories that they evoked. I was amazed at how young we looked back then. Seeing our kids as kids brought tears to my eyes. Remembering people and places long forgotten reminded me that we have lived a very rich life. Flipping from photo to photo, I felt drawn into times long gone.

We don’t take photos that way anymore. Now with a click on my smartphone I can instantaneously record family history. For some reason, it’s not the same. Yea, I know you can somehow download those pics and mysteriously send them in cyberspace and within a twinkling of an eye have them reappear in your mailbox as 4x6 glossies (in triplicate) or even made into a memory book. But who has the time or the tech savvy to do that on a consistent basis.

If I could find that old camera that captured all those family memories, I would trade my smartphone for it in a minute. But that’s not going to happen. I wonder how our kids are going to remember us. I guess I will have to stipulate in my Will that they will have to share my phone so they can view all 10,000 pixels!